Senator Ted Cruz’s Adventist Connections

Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Tea Party darling and the face of the recent government shutdown strategy, is married to the daughter of Adventist missionaries and a graduate of Monterey Bay Adventist Academy in California.

Heidi Nelson Cruz has been getting more scrutiny from the press recently, including this interesting New York Times article today. Anti-establishment conservatives, who have rallied behind Cruz, are less enamored when they learn that his wife is a vice president in the Private Wealth Management Group at Goldman Sachs in Houston, Texas, working with the super-rich.

Heidi Cruz has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a master’s of European Business from Universite Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. She did her undergraduate degree (graduating in 1994), with a double major in economics and international relations, at Claremont McKenna College in California.

Heidi’s brother, Scott Nelson, a graduate of Pacific Union College and Loma Linda University, is an orthopedic surgeon who has worked in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and is now on the faculty at Loma Linda.

Ted Cruz is now being lambasted because while fighting to defund Obamacare, Heidi Cruz confirmed to the New York Times that he is on her Goldman healthcare plan, worth $20,000 a year.

(In a debate during Cruz’s anti-Obamacare marathon in the Senate last month, Cruz would not confess where he got his healthcare coverage.)

Ted Cruz was the commencement speaker at Southwestern Adventist University just last May, where he told the 131 graduates to dream big and be servant leaders, and was given a standing ovation from the packed auditorium and overflow crowds watching from other buildings. Cruz was presented with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree by Southwestern president Eric Anderson.